After-Words

Abstract

With a poem from her latest book, called simply “1941,” Adrienne Rich still questions her earlier confidence that small-scale late nineties private suffering privileges her understanding of the enormous cataclysm that went on in mid-century Europe. Can “the handbook of heartbreak” (Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems, p. 507) or the body “consumed” mindbreak Rich describes in the poem connect us to the qualitatively different breaks and their eventuation into the “evolutionary firebreak” (which Martin Amis insists was) brought into being during the second World War?

Keywords

It is astonishing how little the mainstream has had to say about the nuclear destiny—a destiny that does not want for complication, inclusiveness, pattern, paradox, that does not want for interest. (Nuclear weapons have many demerits but drabness is not one of them.) And yet the senior generation of writers has remained silent; prolific and major though many of them are, with writing lives that straddled the evolutionary firebreak of 1945, they evidently did not find that the subject suggested itself naturally. They lived in one kind of world, then they lived in another kind of world; and they didn’t tell us what the difference was like … It could be argued that all writing—all art, in all times—has a bearing on nuclear weapons, in two important respects. Art celebrates life and not the other thing, not the opposite of life. And art raises the stakes, increasing the store of what might be lost.